[Monotone-devel] Re: linus talk on git

[Bruce Stephens]

Brian May <address@hidden> writes:

>>>>>> "J" == J Decker <J> writes:
>
>     J> Harsh .... (also beware of falling rants) Unforutnatly,
>     J> although monotone has become much much better for performance
>     J> issues... it was knocked out of the world of 'valid'
>     J> distributed version control systems because of speed.
>  
> Maybe I got this wrong, but based on what I have seen so far of this
> talk, I couldn't help but think that Linus didn't consult the Monotone
> developers with his concerns about speed, why it was slow, or how much
> work it would take to improve its speed.

That seems likely.  On the other hand, he didn't really need to: just
looking at the overall design makes it clear that it's not hard to be
*much* faster, if you used a different design.

Just doing "update", monotone checks RSA signatures (to see if
revisions are on the branch), calls lua hooks (for the same reason);
and throughout all that gets its information from SQLite.  (At that
time, IIRC, base64 encoded information, for the binary bits.)

It must have been clear even at the time that if you decided what data
to keep (so you could stick it in some simpler binary format) and
didn't sign most of it, then you could build something much faster.
The result would be less flexible in some ways (as far as I know
monotone and subversion are about the only things that have the rather
handy arbitrary properties that one can attach to revisions).

> Maybe he was just itching to write his own system.

Not sure.  My guess is that if mercurial had been around at the time,
he'd have taken that.  I suspect not much else could realistically be
regarded as scaling well enough.